Bimo Satriaji's project started with no real plan: a camera brought to a friend's show, a handful of portraits shot against the venue's back wall between sets, lit only by whatever spilled from the stage. Two years and eleven venues later, that back-wall habit had become a sustained documentary project with over two hundred subjects.
The constraint that gives the series its consistency is entirely accidental — the same rough framing, the same waist-up crop, the same harsh, unflattering venue light in almost every shot, because Bimo refused to bring his own lighting. 'The moment I add a flash, it stops being their environment and starts being my studio,' he told us.
“I wasn't documenting a scene. I was documenting the same forty people getting slightly older.”
What emerges across the set is less a study of fashion or subculture than of repetition and belonging — the same faces recur across years, visibly aging, sometimes visibly tired, occasionally holding a baby that wasn't there in an earlier frame from the same series.
Bimo is ambivalent about showing the work in a gallery, where it has been requested twice. 'These photos make sense stapled into a zine that gets passed around at the venue they were taken in. Framed on a white wall somewhere else, I'm not sure what they're for anymore.'
He is still shooting. The project has no planned end date, and he says the only thing that would stop him is the venue itself closing, which, he adds, 'is a real possibility every single year, so I try not to skip a show.'
